Geometry
by Joannawrites
Summary: She's Mathematical. Numbers Don't Lie, Presidents Do. *Complete* CJ/Toby, post-ep


Geometry

By Joanna

Summary: She's mathematical. Numbers don't lie, Presidents do.

Rating: PG13 for some racy scenes.

Spoilers: through "17 People"

Category: CJ/Toby, post-ep to 17 People. Where was CJ? The night after. First story in a two-story series about how each deals with initially finding out about the you know what. This one's been in the works since August, but haven't had the time to try and wrap it up until now. 

Feedback: oh yes please! J Here or at gliterin2000@yahoo.com

Disclaimers: Oh, if they were but mine. Alas, they are not, and I'm supposed to say as much here. 

*********

She wasn't even alarmed by the phone when it screeched into her dreams. She was annoyed, and more so when she saw that it was 2:49 a.m. on Saturday, barely, morning, but she wasn't frightened. Once, horrible scenarios would have flashed in her mind in rapid succession in the space it took her to choke out a breathless hello: car wrecks, heart attacks, fires. Now, her job came with late night phone calls. And while feasibly it could mean the end of the world, chances were the President had thought of something he wanted to add to a speech, an anonymous source had a tip, or a reporter wanted an early quote. Then again, sometimes it meant Sam had been photographed with a call girl, so there was really no telling.

"What," she answered the phone, rudely, because she figured whoever it was deserved it for reasons she didn't know yet but would soon enough. 

There was hesitation on the line. With a growl, she started to return the receiver to the cradle. But she heard a voice drift out from the space between her ear and the phone, and it in she heard both uncertainty and worry. "Miss Cregg?"

Not a reporter. Not the White House. The scenarios she hadn't considered before flooded her by force. Was it her father? Hogan? The President? Sam, Josh? "Yes!" she breathed.

"This is Lorraine. Toby Ziegler's neighbor. We met…"

She sat upright in bed, the covers sliding down her body, pooling in her lap. Toby. He was the one she never worried about. He was solid and he was absolutely not allowed to be anything but there. She never worried for him like she did the others.

Lorraine was calling. When Toby insisted, two years ago, that they both exchange contact numbers with their respective neighbors, she had known he had done so out of concern for her. She had no one in the city, and he knew it and he didn't like it and he liked less her thinking she had no one. He'd given Carl, the gay banker next door, his number in case something should go wrong with her or her townhouse, and she'd given Lorraine, a high school chorus teacher who lived in the same building as Toby, her number for the same reason. It had been important to Toby.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Carl was supposed to call Toby to rescue her. Lorraine had been included so Toby didn't seem sexist or like he thought she couldn't take care of herself. She'd known it all along, and she'd accepted it without much protest, and he'd been surprised. With Toby, things were different.

"Is he--what's happened?" She said it in a rush, the words colliding into each other.

Lorraine said, "I think he's okay—but something is wrong…I don't know, but…He's been sitting out in front of the building for several hours. I believe he's been drinking…of course, I can't say for sure…but I thought maybe he'd locked himself out and I know that you have a key to his place. I tried to ask him if I could help him when I got in…but he acted like he didn't hear me. I can see him out the window, and he's just sitting there on the steps. I think something may have happened." 

"I'm on my way," she said, and she wasn't sure if Lorraine had anything else to say because she slammed the phone down in the next second. 

The sheets stretched across the floor after her, falling away as she strode out of them and into a pair of jeans, measuring time in thudding heartbeats. 

Urgency made her clumsy; she fumbled with the button of the jeans, the doorknob, the key in the ignition. 

She'd seen him just a few hours ago. She'd called a full lid, turned off the lights in her office by eight. Very unusual for a Friday night. It had been a light week—the first she could remember in quite some time. She'd dropped by Toby's office on the way out and found him as she had every night for the last six: Sitting in his chair, clutching his rubber ball in a tight grasp before sending it flying against the wall and back again. She stood in the doorway for long minutes and thought he didn't notice she was there. She wondered what to say to him. Something funny, something that would make him smile because he'd stopped doing that.

Without turning around he growled, "what?"

"Three guesses what the new _Post_ reporter just asked me. You won't ever guess."

"You're right," he replied flatly.

"Well, I'm not going to tell you because you're being snippy," she informed him. He didn't turn around. Undaunted, she asked him, "want to get something to eat?"

He waved her away with an impatient jerk of his hand, and she'd stood there for a moment, surprised by his shortness. Not that it was unusual for Toby Ziegler to be short by any means, but he wasn't often that way with her. Or rather he was, but he usually didn't mean it. Tonight it sounded like he meant it.

"Is there something you want to tell me?" she'd ventured when he didn't turn around.

He hurled the ball into the wall; she watched as his hand rose to the exact height of the return arc. 

"Yes." He finally said, and let the ball sail again. "Go home, CJ."

"Fine," she muttered and didn't wait for a response as she pushed off his doorframe and pursued her freedom before Josh or Sam could rip put a halt to it. She'd heard rumors that they were looking for some funny for a speech, and she wanted no part of it. She wanted a bath and a glass or two of wine. She was a girl of simple tastes, she told herself. 

The even rhythm of Toby's frustration resounded down the hallway, staying with her until she left the West Wing, only to be carried from her shoulders by a balmy breeze. She hadn't thought about it, or him, since. 

What the hell had happened after she left him there? She turned onto Toby's street too sharply, and her tires shrilled a protest. 

*

He is drunk.

He was also alone, but now he's only drunk because a long shadow has fallen over him. He looks up and up and up, and there she is, standing in a pool of orange cast down by the streetlight. It makes a halo of her honey hair, and touches each of the drops of mist falling down all around her and settling over her head and clothing. The minute silver spheres glisten, millions of them. 

It looks like stage lights. He thinks she should sing something. Maybe "The Jackal." Then again, she only does that for celebrations and he doesn't know if any of them will ever celebrate anything again.

She's so tall and so straight. Beautiful here in the light, although the shadows are strange, heightening the planes of her face and darkening the hollows of her eyes and cheekbones, until she looks almost skeletal. He sometimes thinks she's too thin. Never tells her so, although he thinks she might like to know that he worries. 

It doesn't matter, not any of it. The world is splitting open at the seams and he doesn't think he can hold it together much longer. 

And now she's here and she's going to see right down to the cold center of him, where this knowledge is still worming its way into the marrow of his bones, still piercing and then controlling every thought, consuming him like the disease that no one ever mentioned.

"Toby," she says, and he gets the feeling that maybe she's been saying it more than the one time. He's sitting there staring up at her, and the lines of her face are drawn so taut that he thinks a cheekbone may appear through the smooth skin there at any time.

He doesn't say anything, because he knows at this point that all the words aren't going to do anything for any of them, and that he can't tell her anyway, and that she's going to demand it. He doesn't like to lie to her and he hopes she won't force him to. He doesn't even know if he can lie to her right now. He feels like the truth is going to be in every crack in his face.

In a moment she steps toward him, and as she leans in he detects the subtle, clean scent of Gardenia and he knows that she really did like the bath salts he gave her for her birthday. She crouches before him and puts a hand on each of his arms, and he thinks that he feels her heat through his soaked suit.

He concentrates very hard on her face. Watches her lips in fascination when she speaks. She's not wearing any lipstick, which is unusual for her. Her lower lip has the indentions of her upper teeth; he notices the tiny gap in the depressions there. Her eyes, in this light, are clear, dove gray, lashes sparkling with mist. 

He tries to read her lips, hears her say as if from a distance, "Toby, are you all right? Are you sick?"

She's funny. She's brilliant and she's funny and right now she's hysterical, or he is, because that strikes him as a grand joke. He's not sick. No, if he were sick—God, the world might still be spinning in only the one direction if he were sick.

He laughs, and startles himself with the sound. It is coarse and ironic. This whole ordeal has been both of those things.

He can't seem to stop laughing. He thinks that maybe he's fallen off the sharp edge of sanity. Wonders why it took so long. He laughs until his ribs feel like they might spread, until he can't catch his breath, until he leans forward and puts his head in both hands and rocks and gasps for air.

He thinks that she sits down beside him. He honestly doesn't know if he's laughing or sobbing.

"Come on," she says at one point, and her voice is deep and husky with sleep. She puts a hand through his elbow and supports him, drags him to his feet and walks him toward her car. 

She's so strong. He follows.

*

It had occurred to her as she stepped out of her car and saw him there in front of his building, that Toby was broken. 

There was no other way to think of him, crouching there, bottle of Jack Daniels tipped against his feet, a blank, shocked expression set into his face like stone. He'd been soaked and shivering and she didn't think he'd noticed. And then, she spoke to him, and he leaned forward and laughed, although it hadn't really been laughter at all so much as near-shouts of desperation. 

She got him in the car. She was taking him home. To her home. She didn't know what else to do, or why she hadn't taken him to his own apartment, steps away. She'd made the decision, and he'd let her, and that, maybe more than anything else, made her afraid for him.

Her stomach flipped once as she glanced at him, sitting there beside her, damp clothes stuck to the white leather seat of her Mustang. He seemed to be falling back into himself a little bit, but the devastation that etched itself into what seemed to be a hundred years worth of new lines on his face made her wish he would go back to the blank stare. 

She was going mad with questions. There was nothing she could imagine that could stun Toby enough to justify this haunted, hunted expression he was wearing. 

In the end, she was, quite simply, too afraid to ask.

*

Her place is warm, and he shivers at the contrast as the hours sitting in the heavy mist finally seem to settle into him. She peels his coat away in the foyer, tosses it toward a coat rack. The buttons clatter against hardwood when she misses.

She tows him to the living room, deposits him on the couch. It is Italian leather, a leftover luxury from her 500K a year days, and he falls into it forever. He thinks his wet clothes are going to mess it up, starts to stand, and she places a hand lightly on his shoulder and he sinks again, as if she had shoved him with brute force.

"I think you need coffee," she says.

Then she is gone and he is staring ahead, but the light is filtered through the raindrops coating his eyelashes and he feels like he can't see anything at all. Everything is bent and distorted. He's been fundamentally screwed with tonight.

Somewhere behind him there's shattering glass and a muffled curse. Louder, she hisses, "son of a bitch."

"Son of a bitch," he thinks he repeats aloud, in agreement. 

*

When she walked back in, he looked a little better to her. He turned his head to watch her come in, raised his hand to take the coffee from her, fingers brushing hers. His hands were too cold, but she didn't comment on it; she nudged the thermostat higher.

"What'd you do to your hand?" he asked, and his voice sounded rusty from disuse and alcohol and probably the cold air.

She turned around in surprise. He hadn't attempted to drink the coffee. His eyes were on her left hand and she looked down to see blood running through her fingers. She turned it over and noticed for the first time the gash across the meaty part of her palm.

She stared at her hand, surprised. "I dropped a mug. I must have cut it picking up the pieces. I don't know."

"It looks deep," he said.

"It's fine," she responded, impatient. He didn't need to be worrying about her hand, for Christ's sake, she thought. He needed to be telling her what the hell was going on with him.

"Toby," she began, cautious but determined to finally have the truth.

"You're bleeding, CJ," he said and looked even more distressed, though she might not have thought that possible.

She put her hand behind her back and waved the other in dismissal. "It doesn't mat---Toby, what happened? What's going on?"

He wouldn't be put off though, and he rose and walked to her. He motioned for her to let him see the injury, and with a frustrated sigh of his name, she laid her hand in his outstretched one.

"You're bleeding," he said, and his voice broke, and he said it several more times, cradling her hand gently in his own, bowing further and further over it. In a moment, a drop of moisture fell onto her palm, and she noticed that his shoulders were shaking.

She'd very rarely seen him drunk. She had never seen him cry before. He'd come close once, as she was sitting across the ambulance from him, Josh's blood on both their hands and his broken body between them. She'd been crying then. But he'd held it together.

"You're bleeding, CJ," he kept saying, as he quietly fell to pieces right there before her. And she didn't know what else to do but to take her hand from his keeping and take him into hers.

*

Jed Bartlet is sick, he thinks as CJ presses her length against him, holding to him tightly. 

It's the first time it has occurred to him. He's finally been able to pull the political consequences aside and look into the reality that this man that he loves, this man that he's put all the faith he's never had before in his life into, this man that is good and capable, this man with the finest mind of their generation, is also sick.

And he doesn't know, right now, whether he's more pissed at President Bartlet for lying to them and to the public, or at President Bartlet for being mortal. 

There's nothing they can do. CJ's brilliant but she can't spin this. Sam is prolific but he can't write an explanation that will appease the public. Josh is savvy, but he can't stop a congressional hearing or impeachment. But they will try and their hearts will all break with their failure, and he knows this, because it's exactly what's happening to him.

CJ, he thinks, may be shaking a little, and he can't even put her at ease. He can't do it because he has to lie to her to do it, and he hates doing that. He got her into this. He came to her in California and said that he thought she could do it, as she looked at him with uncertainty in herself, but trust in him, and she got on a plane and she did it. And she fell down sometimes but she always got back up again. 

He has watched her reign over them all day after day for months now. He did this for her, he thinks sometimes, but he always knows that he didn't really. She's pulled herself along by the very tips of her fingers sometimes, but by God, she's gotten there. 

He did this _to_ her, he thinks for the first time. They are going to get knocked down in a great fall, and he's the reason why she'll be destroyed. She won't recover; none of them will.

He can stand that less than Jed Bartlet's debilitating illness. Because he knows that he's going to lose her over this. They are all going to lose each other and themselves.

*

She put her arms around him and held him as tightly as she could, hoping to take some of his pain from him by sheer physical strength. His fingers splayed across her back, pressing her in as if he hoped the same thing. Her good hand whispered across his damp hair and the heated back of his neck, stroking gently, asking by touch what he needed from her. 

When he pulled back slightly, his eyes were liquid blackness, searching hers with an intensity that made her want to pull away and come closer in equal parts. 

She was very still when his hand rose against her cheek, fingertip tracing cheekbone, jawbone, sliding down throat. She felt her heart leap upwards, as if straining toward his touch, when his hand moved across her collarbone.

She had seen that look in his eyes once before, saw the question and she knew how to answer it now. A late night, long ago, when he'd showed up at her doorstep in the middle of the night. He hadn't spoken to her then either, hadn't told her why beforehand. He'd asked something of her, and she'd given because she cared so much for him. 

It was only after that she found out Andi had left him. She'd felt confused and used the next morning when he was gone, the only indication he'd been there the depression in her pillow.

They hadn't ever spoken of it, but she'd seen an apology in his eyes the next time they'd seen one another, and because it was Toby, it had been enough.

*

There's something restless in her eyes now, something cautious but not resistant when his fingertips slide up her throat again. He feels the gooseflesh rise up as his hand moves. He has always been fascinated by the length of her throat. 

He closes his fingers into the fine hair at the base of her skull and he wants with his eyes.

You're sure? She wonders, not out loud, but he hears her fine.

Please, he returns as silently, and he can't hold her gaze any longer.

It doesn't matter because her hand slides from his shoulder to his chest and she anchors her fingers into his tie, and when he looks back at her there's something a little shy but urgent in her and he has his answer.

*

Everything in her quickened when his lips moved over hers, gently at first but then with a demand and a need that startled her. She responded to him in every way, opening beneath him, heard the small cry that escaped from deep in her, quickly lost in him. 

His hands moved with urgency and blind need, seeking her under her clothes, and she was startled by just how hot his fingers had become. His touch was feather light but she seemed to collapse under the weight of it. He stroked her breast for torturous moments and she cast back her head and bit her lip, burning. His own mouth moved against her straining neck as the full weight of his hand finally covered her firmly, and she wondered if he could tell her heart was thundering just beneath him. Her injured hand was clenched at her side, sticky with blood, and underneath her curled fingers she could feel the throbbing of every hard heartbeat.

There were a million things wrong with this, but with his hands upon her, she couldn't give voice to any of them.

"Toby," she whispered instead, and tears welled against her lashes, but he didn't notice.

*

She is perfectly geometric. He forgot that somewhere along the way. She's built on sharp angles, flat planes, long lines, and gentle arcs, and he thinks that the answer to every problem must lie somewhere in the slope of her collarbone or the circumference of her breasts. 

She's mathematical. Numbers don't lie, Presidents do.

His mouth seeks to measure all of her, lips sliding down throat and across shoulder as he pulls the shirt from her and drops it. He explores the diameter of her breast, the concave curve of her waist, the incline of hip, the slope of belly, and her jeans fall away with a push from him, and the infinite parallel of her legs meets him.

She's trembling and still covered in gooseflesh, and all he can think is that soon she'll be so far beyond his reach that he'll never touch her again. And the desire to make her his somehow, to imprint himself on her forever is suddenly great and need overtakes him, and he pulls her toward the couch.

*

He entered her quickly, there on the couch, and there was a stretching kind of pain. She bit her lip and tried not to flinch. But he immediately sensed her tenseness and saw the discomfort on her face, and he pulled back quickly. 

"I'm sorry," he whispered, breath hot upon her face. She thought that he might turn away from her, thought that he'd suddenly realized that she wasn't what he wanted. He looked horrified.

"It's been awhile," she said, and felt the heat in her cheeks. She couldn't look at him any more. "I'm fine."

"I'm sorry. I was…I just…here," he said and he bent his head over hers and kissed her fully and set to making her ready.

She was both trembling and sweating when he came into her again and she arched up to meet him with a sharp cry that had nothing to do with pain.

He was far, far away, though, driving into her with a desperation that frightened her for him. It was an invasion and a battle, and she knew it was waged completely inside of him. His hands, his lips, his body made a blind plea that still begged an answer to the questions he couldn't ask. 

This time, she knew, she didn't have his answers. 

*

Sometime during the dawn she stirs, then starts, because she remembers. Her long-lidded eyes open quickly, find him. The room has started to give over to light, and her skin has gone soft, soft gold, as if she is lit from within. He thinks that if he lay a hand against smooth shoulder, sharp collarbone, she'd pulse with gentle heat, but he doesn't dare touch her again. 

He's been sitting on the edge of the bed since she drifted towards dreams, alternately looking at her, and when he couldn't bear to do that any longer, out the window. 

"Go back to sleep," his voice is a little hoarse. He sounds more himself he thinks, but doesn't feel it. He didn't find his answers inside of her. 

Her voice sounds as raw as his, he thinks. "So you can leave quietly?" 

"Yes," he says simply, because he's always had so little use for lying to her. 

He thinks she winces as she shifts to her elbow, sheet whispering down smooth skin. He sees the marks of his mouth on her breasts, and has a brief memory of moving from couch to bed, of fingers and lips ripping at skin, hers and his; him to tear the grief and anger from himself, her to tear the truth from him. In the end, they'd been somewhat gentled, but neither really satisfied. 

"You won't tell me," she says, a little angry.

"Can't tell you." He corrects her, but it sounds empty and petty and not good enough. 

She'll know soon enough. And then he'll never touch her again. 

*

She thought that maybe she should have made it harder on him. Maybe she should have stayed awake, told him that if he was going to leave, he could damn sure do it to her face instead of waiting to slither out when she was asleep. He could be a man about it.

But he still looked so defeated, so angry, so…frightened…that she rose up, feeling all the sore muscles in her body tighten uncomfortably. She put a hand on the back of his neck, guided him toward her so that she could kiss him on the mouth, lightly. Friends again, not lovers.

"Whatever it is…it'll be all right," she said, and she didn't know what it was, but the words fell from her lips already hollow.

One hand covered hers for a moment, then dropped away. He turned back to the window, and she eased back down, turning her back to him. In a moment, the sheet slipped up to cover her shoulder; his doing, not hers. 

She willed herself to lay still, in waiting, staring at the black dried blood on the cut across the palm of her outstretched arm. And when he thought she was sleeping again, the bed rocked gently under her as he got up, and already dressed, left her there. Confused, angry, scared, lonely. 

She closed her eyes tightly. What was coming for them? She could feel it now…it had seeped from him, stalked into her, and though she couldn't wrap her mind around it yet, her heart moved in heavy, deliberate measures of dread. Soon, she thought. Whatever it was, she'd know it soon.

And would she forgive herself, or him, whenever she learned the why of it all?

--The End

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